Would you rather have resizeability or better animations?

[Violaine Villota]

When purchasing non-clothing attachments for your AV like wings, tails, headdresses, etc, is a smooth rigged mesh animation more important than the ability to resize the items or would you rather have slightly less perfect animations with attachments that you can resize however you want?

I was working on making new animated wings and realized that if I make them mesh people won't be able to resize them, correct?  I would have to offer a few sizes as I do now. I tried for a week to make Bento animated wings where the mesh was just an invisible  base to attach flexi wings to but it seems impossible, because the prims want to float to an area not rigged rather than to the attached mesh pieces. So, it's either new mesh wings that are Bento animated and rigged with a few sizes in the package that can't be edited, or flexi prim wings with animations that do allow for editing/resize. Mesh would be more work and time for every new design, but if that is what people prefer to buy then it's worth it.

Please comment with your preference if you have one ?

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

44 minutes ago, Violaine Villota said:

When purchasing non-clothing attachments for your AV like wings, tails, headdresses, etc, is a smooth rigged mesh animation more important than the ability to resize the items or would you rather have slightly less perfect animations with attachments that you can resize however you want?

I was working on making new animated wings and realized that if I make them mesh people won't be able to resize them, correct?  I would have to offer a few sizes as I do now. I tried for a week to make Bento animated wings where the mesh was just an invisible  base to attach flexi wings to but it seems impossible, because the prims want to float to an area not rigged rather than to the attached mesh pieces. So, it's either new mesh wings that are Bento animated and rigged with a few sizes in the package that can't be edited, or flexi prim wings with animations that do allow for editing/resize. Mesh would be more work and time for every new design, but if that is what people prefer to buy then it's worth it.

Please comment with your preference if you have one ?

 

Can you put a resizer script into a mesh item and allow the resizing that way?  I truly know nothing about the rules of creating mesh items.  Otherwise, I'd probably prefer the mesh ones w/ Bento animations and limited sizes -- if the animations really are good ones.  And of course, I'd want a demo available.

[Callum Meriman]

1 hour ago, Violaine Villota said:

When purchasing non-clothing attachments for your AV like wings, tails, headdresses, etc, is a smooth rigged mesh animation more important than the ability to resize the items or would you rather have slightly less perfect animations with attachments that you can resize however you want?

As a committed Neko (or is that "I should be committed") the quality of the tail itself is most important.

Resizing has some merit, I am standard sized, and sort of a petite androgynous avatar, so something for a 9 foot person would be too large for me, and likely slap people about. The ultimate tail I've found so far is Bento, fluffy, and has 4 sizes in the box, I just wear the one that best fits me. Not purrfect, but close enough.

Animations are less important to me, as long as they are decent. Unlike my AO I normally don't change the way my tail moves. As long as it's a smooth flick side to side it's enough, and a steadier animation when I sit (that doesn't look silly on danceballs). Anything else is, for me, a bonus.

Ultimately though it was a different reason why I won't return to a prim tail now. The complexity of the bento tail is lower, and it works with less lag to my viewer - especially in busy sims, where a prim tail breaks up in a lag induced mess.

 

1 hour ago, Violaine Villota said:

I was working on making new animated wings and realized that if I make them mesh people won't be able to resize them, correct?

Rigged mesh is not resizable, no. Several sizes are supplied normally. With Bento that's done in other mystical ways I don't understand, the animation/mesh forum would help there.

1 hour ago, Violaine Villota said:

I tried for a week to make Bento animated wings where the mesh was just an invisible  base to attach flexi wings to but it seems impossible, because the prims want to float to an area not rigged rather than to the attached mesh pieces.

If you did it with bento you would not attach flexi prims, you would animate the mesh itself via the bones. The prims go to "weird places" just as attaching prims to rigged mesh leaves the prim at the attachment point, it won't move from hand to rigged position, it stays at hand.

Medhue's videos on youtube are well worth looking at.

1 hour ago, Violaine Villota said:

it's either new mesh wings that are Bento animated and rigged with a few sizes in the package that can't be edited

I wish I could advise  the difference is likely too large between fluffy multi-segment tails vs. flexible, wind flowing wings.

I hope some Fae can chime in!

[Nova Convair]

Why "or"? I want both!

However, mesh is resizeable of course but rigged mesh is not. So there is no other way as providing different sizes to choose from.

[Violaine Villota]

Thank you all. 
 

21 minutes ago, Nova Convair said:

Why "or"? I want both!

However, mesh is resizeable of course but rigged mesh is not. So there is no other way as providing different sizes to choose from.

Ah yes, and it would have to be rigged in order to animate them.
*sigh* I do wish that the wing bones attachments could work with any prims just like attaching to any other limb. Oh well.
I wish I could offer both, and I suppose I could but it's extra work and I have a few years of designs I want to catch up with releasing.
 

[Violaine Villota]

Now, would mesh cause less lag or more when animated compared to flexi prims using an animation built in-world? I'm not sure about the answer to that.

[LittleMe Jewell]

2 minutes ago, Violaine Villota said:

Now, would mesh cause less lag or more when animated compared to flexi prims using an animation built in-world? I'm not sure about the answer to that.

Those questions might be better asked in one of the Creation forums.

[Theresa Tennyson]

2 hours ago, Violaine Villota said:

Thank you all. 
 

Ah yes, and it would have to be rigged in order to animate them.
*sigh* I do wish that the wing bones attachments could work with any prims just like attaching to any other limb. Oh well.
I wish I could offer both, and I suppose I could but it's extra work and I have a few years of designs I want to catch up with releasing.
 

There are left and right wing attachment points now that should follow the wing bones when they're animated.

[Violaine Villota]

5 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

There are left and right wing attachment points now that should follow the wing bones when they're animated.

You would think so, but whenever I've tried the prims attach far away from the body. Trying to edit them is a nightmare as every time I try to rotate it loses it's position completely. Unless there's a special way to do it, but I've searched and tested and it just won't work for me. At least not with regular prims, do you mean with rigged mesh?

[Violaine Villota]

@Theresa Tennyson if there IS a way to attach plain ol' prims in SL to the wing bones with no rigged  mesh, and use animations please do confirm and let me know what I'm missing because it goes all wonky when I try  One of the issues for me specifically is that these are fairy wings rather than angel or bat wings. Most of the animated mesh wings I see, that use Bento animations are single panels on either side shaped like a bird or bat wing and using the whole wing bone.
The movements are very different than for a fairy or insect wing so I have not been able to use any existing animations so far.

[Ceka Cianci]

After getting my newer Bento horse and the realistic animations that come with it..It showed me how important good animation can change my world..

If I had to choose,which at some point I hope we won't..I'd probably go with animation..

I'd still be walking like a duck without it..

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

9 hours ago, Violaine Villota said:

You would think so, but whenever I've tried the prims attach far away from the body. Trying to edit them is a nightmare as every time I try to rotate it loses it's position completely. Unless there's a special way to do it, but I've searched and tested and it just won't work for me. At least not with regular prims, do you mean with rigged mesh?

That's because the attachment point for the wing is located near the end of the wing (on the mWing4 bones) whereas the pivot point you need for the wing is closer to mWing1 (on the back/shoulder blades). 

 

As long as your wing animation only rotates the mWing1 bones (which should be okay for insect type wings since they don't have multiple bones so a simple flapping motion using the mWing1 bone would be all that's required) then you should be able to align your wing objects along the wing bones so that they lay along a straight line between the attachment point and the origin for the mWing1 bones.

 

The problem is the origin of the mWing1 bones are still "floating" outside the avatar mesh rather than aligned with the surface of the back...

...so you'll probably need to use a rigged mesh attachment with joint offsets to fix that, otherwise your wings will pivot in the wrong place when the flapping animation is playing.

You'll definitely need wing animations that only rotate the mWing1 bone though, any movement on the other mWing bones is going to make your attachments fly around in all sorts of crazy directions!

[ChinRey]

14 hours ago, Violaine Villota said:

Now, would mesh cause less lag or more when animated compared to flexi prims using an animation built in-world? I'm not sure about the answer to that.

There is no definite answer to that. It depends on so many factors.

As for the main question, I don't really see any advantages and several disadvantages of using Bento for stiff insect wings and other attachments that only needs to be rotated around a fixed attachment point. That's even regardless of the resizing issue.

For flexible wings I really want Bento these days. If they can move fast enough that is. Bento or no Bento, bird and bat wings that only can flap once or twice a second just look silly.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

33 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

There is no definite answer to that. It depends on so many factors.

As for the main question, I don't really see any advantages and several disadvantages of using Bento for stiff insect wings and other attachments that only needs to be rotated around a fixed attachment point. That's even regardless of the resizing issue.

For flexible wings I really want Bento these days. If they can move fast enough that is. Bento or no Bento, bird and bat wings that only can flap once or twice a second just look silly.

I guess the main benefit would be simulating smooth movement without running into problems in laggy areas, using bento animations would probably be better for producing flapping motions where the wing speed increases and decreases gradually like this...

as well as for those random flex and flutter type motions which can add a little variety and life to wing animations.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I guess the main benefit would be simulating smooth movement without running into problems in laggy areas, using bento animations would probably be better for producing flapping motions where the wing speed increases and decreases gradually like this...

Maybe but it's still a question of speed. To create a convincing bird, bat or butterfly wing movement you typically have to be able to run through an entire cycle in no more than - say one tenth of a second. If you have an fps of 40, that means the image on your computer screen will only be redrawn four times during the entire wing stroke. Not much room for subtleties there.

Those numbers are just examples of course. Actual wing stroke frequency for animals varies between one (vultures) to 200 (flies) per second. But even birds with low stroke frequency tend to beat their wings quite fast - the low frequency only means they rest for a long time between the beats - so 1/10th second strokes isn't too far off even for them. So if you want convincing wing movements in SL, you need to sacrifice nuances for speed, not the other way round.

 

2 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

as well as for those random flex and flutter type motions which can add a little variety and life to wing animations.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there. The way I see it, the lack of randomness is one of the major flaws in the SL avatar animation system.

Edited October 1, 2017 by ChinRey

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there. The way I see it, the lack of randomness is one of the major flaws in the SL avatar animation system.

I see your point, and as far as the SL avatar animation system being flawed I'd have to agree, and am looking forward to the new improvements they've been talking about.  It would be nice if they added more control over playback of animations, similar to the options we have for texture animations with loop/reverse/ping-pong and better control over where animations start and stop, maybe even some scripted control of the ease in/ease out parameters so we can "blend" animations together, but hey we can all dream I guess.

As for your points about speed vs framerate, etc, I agree to an extent but it sounds like the word you're searching for is "realistic" not "convincing", there's plenty of examples where realism doesn't work in cinematography, games, etc.  (the classic example being how they have to stop filming snow scenes when it snows in RL because real snow doesn't look real on screen).  I guess my point is that realism isn't always what people strive for in Second Life, sometimes it's preferable to go with whatever is the most aesthetically pleasing.  In the example of fairy wings for avatars you could argue that as humanoids are a lot larger than insects their wing speed would be reduced,  (after all, who can say what speed a fairies wings would beat at "realistically"?), but now we're bordering on the realms of artistic license and personal preference, which is a lot more subjective I guess.

[Violaine Villota]

7 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

That's because the attachment point for the wing is located near the end of the wing (on the mWing4 bones) whereas the pivot point you need for the wing is closer to mWing1 (on the back/shoulder blades). 

 

As long as your wing animation only rotates the mWing1 bones (which should be okay for insect type wings since they don't have multiple bones so a simple flapping motion using the mWing1 bone would be all that's required) then you should be able to align your wing objects along the wing bones so that they lay along a straight line between the attachment point and the origin for the mWing1 bones.

 

The problem is the origin of the mWing1 bones are still "floating" outside the avatar mesh rather than aligned with the surface of the back...

...so you'll probably need to use a rigged mesh attachment with joint offsets to fix that, otherwise your wings will pivot in the wrong place when the flapping animation is playing.

You'll definitely need wing animations that only rotate the mWing1 bone though, any movement on the other mWing bones is going to make your attachments fly around in all sorts of crazy directions!

Well if I have to make rigged wings anyway, involving the other wing bones in the animation shouldn't break the attachments as long as it's rigged properly. I see no reason why the multiple bones couldn't be used to add a little flexing motion to the wings and have seen other's rigged mesh fairy wings that do so. I have already transformed the wing bone structure in Blender / Avastar to bring the pivot point of the M1 wing bone closer to the Av back so that's not an issue.
I had just tried to make little base pieces for flexi wings where the base pieces were rigged to wing bones that had been deformed and shortened to a nub to try to avoid the weird attachment issue but it still didn't work so I've given up on that particular method.

[Violaine Villota]

@ChinRey Well I will try some Bento wings, with various flying motions plus some flex to the rigged mesh. The flexi aspect is the main reason why I tried so hard for a week to see if I could merge a Bento animation with flexi attachments but I'm done with that, total fail. That is, if I can figure out why Blender is so damn unreliable sometimes or why all of a sudden I can't rotate an object anymore  Blender is going to drive me to drink, ugh! LOL 
If it works though, I'm excited about all the options with animating in there! @Fluffy Sharkfin yes exactly, that's what I want are realistic - or at least, somehow more natural looking since 'realistic' isn't always desirable or practical depending on the environment - movements with some random little flicks and varying speeds of flutter.

Or maybe I'll put out a version of each as a group gift and see what the feedback is. They deserve it anyway for how long I've been gone. 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, Violaine Villota said:

I see no reason why the multiple bones couldn't be used to add a little flexing motion to the wings and have seen other's rigged mesh fairy wings that do so.

Since you've abandoned the idea of adding flexi-prims to rigged mesh this is a little redundant, but just to clarify what i was trying to say, rigged mesh will have no problem using multiple wing bones, but were you to try and add non-rigged attachments hoping to make them seem as if they align with the rigged wings and join to the avatars torso at the point where wings would normally pivot then changing the rotation of any bone past mWing1 will change this...

into this...

... (or something equally odd-looking).  As you can see from the second image, the alignment of the "fake pivot" on the non-rigged attachment is offset when you rotate mWing2 and the rotation on mWing1 then makes the part that would normally appear as if it were attached to the avatar move around.

As I said, it's not all that relevant since you're no longer pursuing the idea of using non-rigged attachments in conjunction with rigged mesh, but since my previous attempt to explain the problem was perhaps a little vague I figured I'd provide an example.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

As for your points about speed vs framerate, etc, I agree to an extent but it sounds like the word you're searching for is "realistic" not "convincing",

No, I was actually very concious about the difference and very careful which word to use here.

I do of course realize that the question what is convincing is a bit subjective but even so, take a look at the butterflies here: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Buttermere/27/240/35. Those are Arduenn Schwartzmann's and I think everybody will notice how much more convincing, realistic and credible they look than other SL butterflies. And that's even in a hifgh lag area where you can't really see them from their best side. The main reason for that is that they flap their wings faster than the ususal "butterfly path" butterlies. (It's a shame Arduenn doesn't seem to sell his butterflies anymore btw. They're one of the true gems of Second Life and still among the very best SL animals of any kind ever.)

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

11 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

No, I was actually very concious about the difference and very careful which word to use here.

I do of course realize that the question what is convincing is a bit subjective but even so, take a look at the butterflies here: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Buttermere/27/240/35. Those are Arduenn Schwartzmann's and I think everybody will notice how much more convincing, realistic and credible they look than other SL butterflies. And that's even in a hifgh lag area where you can't really see them from their best side. The main reason for that is that they flap their wings faster than the ususal "butterfly path" butterlies. (It's a shame Arduenn doesn't seem to sell his butterflies anymore btw. They're one of the true gems of Second Life and still among the very best SL animals of any kind ever.)

Thanks, I'll definitely go and check them out next time I'm in-world!

But if we're talking realism then surely we have to consider the issue of scale. The larger the wing area the more air resistance and therefore the more energy is required to flap the wings, so if a humanoid had a pair of wings that were in scale with their body then the amount of food they would have to consume in order to flap their wings at the same speed as an insect while flying would be ridiculous, they'd probably have to spend 95% of their waking life eating just so they can fly once a day.  I'll agree that faster wings look more realistic on small butterflies and insects and realistically sized birds, but if you want "realism" for fairy wing speed then there are other factors that should to be taken into account besides what type of insect the wing looks like it came from.

As you rightly pointed out the question of what is convincing is subjective, especially when dealing with things that don't technically exist in reality.  You can choose to go the full scientific route and use only physics and real world examples to formulate a hypothesis of how a thing will work or you can let your imagination run wild and just go with what you think looks best (personally I've always admire those that are capable of combining both).

[Violaine Villota]

55 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Since you've abandoned the idea of adding flexi-prims to rigged mesh this is a little redundant, but just to clarify what i was trying to say, rigged mesh will have no problem using multiple wing bones, but were you to try and add non-rigged attachments hoping to make them seem as if they align with the rigged wings and join to the avatars torso at the point where wings would normally pivot then changing the rotation of any bone past mWing1 will change this...

into this...

... (or something equally odd-looking).  As you can see from the second image, the alignment of the "fake pivot" on the non-rigged attachment is offset when you rotate mWing2 and the rotation on mWing1 then makes the part that would normally appear as if it were attached to the avatar move around.

As I said, it's not all that relevant since you're no longer pursuing the idea of using non-rigged attachments in conjunction with rigged mesh, but since my previous attempt to explain the problem was perhaps a little vague I figured I'd provide an example.

Ah! Okay I see what you mean now, yes that should work if I don't care about the wings not flexing at all, but I do like the idea of them having a little bit of the appearance of flex, which was the whole reason I was trying so hard to get prim attachments to work because  then making the wings flexi would take care of that and I could be lazy about rigging anything ;P Not rigging them would take care of the resizing issue however, at least I think it would? This would mean I would still have to bind the mesh to the armature in Avastar for the to attach to the right place anyway, correct? And then wouldn't that break the ability to resize inworld? 
I'm not sure what program you are using to show the animation, is that in Blender or in SL?
 Also I thought it would be great if I could make a sort of 'wing adapter' so that any avatar could attach any wings they wanted to it and have the animations as long as they had edit and copy abilities on the wing panels. Alas, that's just not gonna happen. So it's back to rigged mesh or in-world animated flexi prims. It's sounding like people like the Bento animations more though...

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

4 minutes ago, Violaine Villota said:

Ah! Okay I see what you mean now, yes that should work if I don't care about the wings not flexing at all, but I do like the idea of them having a little bit of the appearance of flex, which was the whole reason I was trying so hard to get prim attachments to work because  then making the wings flexi would take care of that and I could be lazy about rigging anything ;P

Yes, if you were to use flexi-prims in your non-rigged attachments it would probably give the same appearance of "flexing" (depending on the orientation and settings you use for the flexi-prims) without the need for rigging.  Honestly I think that "results may vary" will be kind of an understatement, I can imagine how if you get them just right they could look pretty cool, but I foresee a lot of tweaking and fiddling to get them to that point (it's been a really long time since I played with flexi-prims much but I do remember them being kind of glitchy and annoying to work with).

 

9 minutes ago, Violaine Villota said:

Not rigging them would take care of the resizing issue however, at least I think it would? This would mean I would still have to bind the mesh to the armature in Avastar for the to attach to the right place anyway, correct? And then wouldn't that break the ability to resize inworld? 

If you're going to use non-rigged attachments then you won't need to rig any part of the wings, at most you'll need a separate rigged mesh attachment (which can basically be made 100% transparent or hidden in some other way) to set the joint offsets.  There are a couple of Bento tails that use the same system to adjust the length of the tail without having to include multiple sizes, you simply attach the appropriate "resizer" attachment for the tail length you want and that offsets the bone positions to change the length of the rigged mesh tail you're wearing.  That way you can supply something which repositions the mWing1 origin to the right place while not having to include any rigged mesh in your otherwise non-rigged wings (it also means you can potentially provide different versions of the rigged mesh attachment to account for different avatar sizes).

 

16 minutes ago, Violaine Villota said:

I'm not sure what program you are using to show the animation, is that in Blender or in SL?

It's Maya, but the same would apply in Blender/Avastar.

 

17 minutes ago, Violaine Villota said:

 Also I thought it would be great if I could make a sort of 'wing adapter' so that any avatar could attach any wings they wanted to it and have the animations as long as they had edit and copy abilities on the wing panels. Alas, that's just not gonna happen. So it's back to rigged mesh or in-world animated flexi prims.

Not entirely sure what you mean by a "wing adapter" but it sounds similar to the concept I described above with having a separate rigged mesh attachment to set the offsets of mWing1?

 

19 minutes ago, Violaine Villota said:

It's sounding like people like the Bento animations more though...

It does seem to be the "big thing" at the moment, and even if it doesn't turn out the way you expected chances are you'll learn some handy relevant skills along the way, best of luck! 

[Violaine Villota]

40 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Yes, if you were to use flexi-prims in your non-rigged attachments it would probably give the same appearance of "flexing" (depending on the orientation and settings you use for the flexi-prims) without the need for rigging.  Honestly I think that "results may vary" will be kind of an understatement, I can imagine how if you get them just right they could look pretty cool, but I foresee a lot of tweaking and fiddling to get them to that point (it's been a really long time since I played with flexi-prims much but I do remember them being kind of glitchy and annoying to work with).

 

If you're going to use non-rigged attachments then you won't need to rig any part of the wings, at most you'll need a separate rigged mesh attachment (which can basically be made 100% transparent or hidden in some other way) to set the joint offsets.  There are a couple of Bento tails that use the same system to adjust the length of the tail without having to include multiple sizes, you simply attach the appropriate "resizer" attachment for the tail length you want and that offsets the bone positions to change the length of the rigged mesh tail you're wearing.  That way you can supply something which repositions the mWing1 origin to the right place while not having to include any rigged mesh in your otherwise non-rigged wings (it also means you can potentially provide different versions of the rigged mesh attachment to account for different avatar sizes).

 

It's Maya, but the same would apply in Blender/Avastar.

 

Not entirely sure what you mean by a "wing adapter" but it sounds similar to the concept I described above with having a separate rigged mesh attachment to set the offsets of mWing1?

 

It does seem to be the "big thing" at the moment, and even if it doesn't turn out the way you expected chances are you'll learn some handy relevant skills along the way, best of luck! 

Hmm, well I've done what you suggested, using mesh attachments that are rigged to the wing bones that I planned to make invisible, and I tried to attach the flexi prims to that. I had even deformed the armature / rig so that the wing bones were reduced to little nubs the same size as the little mesh base pieces but it still doesn't work  Here is a video of what happens when I try to edit the flexi attachment. I attached the flexi prims to the mesh piece when rezzed on the ground - since I can't attach them while it's worn anyway - then took it back and attached to the proper wing bone. It had moved away from the original point where it was attached while rezzed on the ground. I can move it okay, but rotating is a hot mess. Every single rotation movement changes its position and moves it farther away from the mesh attachment. I don't know if there is a fix for this but after a week of torturing myself trying to make this work and asking in the forums with no replies, I am DONE, LOL. Done with trying to do it THAT way at least unless someone can point me in the right direction.

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Violaine Villota said:

Hmm, well I've done what you suggested, using mesh attachments that are rigged to the wing bones that I planned to make invisible, and I tried to attach the flexi prims to that.

Sorry, I think you have the wrong idea, you don't attach the non-rigged wings to the rigged mesh, you wear the rigged mesh object which fixes the mWing1 bone positions separately, then you need to attach each non-rigged wing to the corresponding wing attachment point, then rotate and reposition it to align with the bones of the wing so that the pivot point for the wing matches the position of the origin for mWing1 (in order to do this go to the Develop menu at the top of the screen and choose Avatar > Show Bones so you can see the wing bones of your avatar).

11 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

align your wing objects along the wing bones so that they lay along a straight line between the attachment point and the origin for the mWing1 bones.

Once you have the non-rigged wings positioned so they line up with the wing bones of your avatar, then as long as the wing animation you're using is only rotating mWing1 the non-rigged wings should stay aligned.